A pragmatic approach for analysis and design of service inventories

Service Orientation is a paradigm for exposing business functions as reusable services and enabling business partners to discover those services on demand. Several service-oriented methodologies have been proposed in both academia and industry. Few methodologies, however, do provide concrete yet pragmatic support for developing software that is truly service-oriented, supporting service-specific aspects and challenges. As a consequence, the design of software services that are in-line with service aspects is left up to the prudence of the developers. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a methodology that incorporates essential ingredients of SOA during analysis and design. The methodology focuses service inventories while consciously addressing the perspectives of both service providers and service consumers. By supporting service-oriented reasoning, our methodology results in better reusable services, and the available inventories aid the development of service-oriented systems in a more cost-effective way. This is of the essence in cloud computing, which is a fast-spreading business model promising high ROI and cost savings.